In third generation UMTS systems (cf. 3GPP TS 23.002, “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Services and Systems Aspects; Network architecture (Release 8)”, December 2007) and in particular in its evolved version SAE/LTE (cf. 3GPP TS 23.401 v8.1.0 (also referred to as Evolved Packet System, EPS), “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Services and System Aspects; General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) enhancements for Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) access (Release 8)”, March 2008 and 3GPP TS 36.401 v8.1.0, “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN); Architecture description (Release 8), March 2008), the concept of home base stations is introduced. In 3G a home base station is referred to as a Home Node B (HNB) whereas in EPS it is referred to as a Home eNode B (HeNB). A home base station is assumed to be placed in a private home, utilizing the home owner's fixed broadband connection to access a core network of mobile telecommunications system. It is also assumed that the home owner handles the actual physical installation of the home base station. Hence, the deployment of home base stations cannot be planned, since it is largely outside the control of an operator of the mobile telecommunications system. Another important property of the home base station concept is the potentially very large number of home base stations.
A home base station (such as a Home NodeB or Home eNodeB) connects to the operator's core network via a secure tunnel (supposedly IPsec protected) to a security gateway at the border of the operator's network. Via this tunnel the home base station connects to the core network nodes of the operator's core network (e.g. MME and S-GW via an S1 interface in EPS or SGSN and MSC (or MGW and MSC server) via an Iu-interface or Iuh interface in 3G UMTS). A 3GPP operator may also deploy a concentrator node in its network between the home base stations and the regular core network nodes. In the EPS standardization such a concentrator node is commonly referred to as a HeNB Gateway, which may be an optional node in EPS HeNB solutions. The corresponding node name in 3G UMTS standardization is HNB Gateway and this node is mandatory in 3G HNB systems.
For both EPS and 3G UMTS the home base station uses a broadband access network as (part of the) transport network. Possible Network Address Translators (NAT) between the home base station and the core network are not a problem for the secure tunnel when using, e.g. an Internet key Exchange Protocol (such as IKEv2), which can handle NAT traversal (i.e. activate UDP (User Datagram Protocol) encapsulation for EPS traffic as needed) and is assumed to be used for the secure tunnel establishment.
Furthermore, the user plane security, the RLC protocol, and the PDCP protocol are terminated in the RNC in 3G and in the eNode B in LTE. When a home base station is used, these protocols are terminated in the home base station (in the HNB, as the RNC functionality is placed in the HNB in the 3G HNB architecture, or in the HeNB in LTE), which makes user plane IP packets readily visible in the home base station.
Through this setup a User Equipment (UE, also referred to as a mobile terminal) can communicate via the home base station and the core network like any other UE. However, since the home base station is connected to its owner's broadband access (e.g. a broadband modem) it is potentially a part of a home LAN (also known as a local CPE network). The UE may thus potentially communicate with other devices connected to the home LAN, e.g. a printer or a computer. As a consequence the home base station related mechanisms must enable a UE to communicate both locally (with devices in the home LAN) and remotely (with devices outside of the home LAN) and it should preferably be possible to mix these two types of traffic and have both local and remote communication sessions ongoing simultaneously.
However, according to prior art solutions a home base station is not able to distinguish and give special treatment to traffic relating to local communication sessions compared to traffic relating to remote communication sessions. There is thus no way in existing home base station solutions to handle local and remote traffic differently in order to achieve more efficient traffic handling adapted to the specific type of traffic.